Reunion

When I saw Mack Bolger, he was standing beside the bottom of the marble steps that bring travellers and passersby to and from the balcony of the main concourse in Grand Central. It was before Christmas last year, when the weather stayed so warm and watery the spirit seemed to go out of the season.

I was cutting through the terminal, as I often do on my way home from the publishing offices, on Fifty-first. I was, in fact, on my way to meet a new friend at Billy’s. It was four o’clock on Friday, and the great station was athrong with citizens on their way somewhere, laden with baggage and precious packages, shouting goodbyes and greetings, flagging their arms, embracing, gripping each other with pleasure. Others, though, simply stood, as Mack Bolger was when I saw him, staring rather vacantly at the crowds, as if whomever he was there to meet for some reason hadn’t come. Mack is a tall, handsome, well-put-together man who seems to see everything from a height. He was wearing a long gabardine overcoat of some deep-olive twill—an expensive coat, I thought, an Italian coat. His brown shoes were polished to a high gloss. His trouser cuffs hit them just right. And because he was without a hat he seemed even taller than what he was—perhaps six-three. His hands were in his coat pockets, his smooth chin was slightly elevated, the way a middle-aged man’s would be, and as if he thought he was extremely visible there. His hair was thinning a little in front, but it was carefully cut, and he was tanned, which caused his square face and prominent brow to appear heavy, almost artificially so, as though in a peculiar way the man I saw were not Mack Bolger but an effigy situated precisely there to attract my attention.

For a while, a year and a half before, I had been involved with Mack Bolger’s wife, Beth Bolger. Oddly enough—only because all events that occur outside New York seem odd and fancifully unreal to New Yorkers—our affair had taken place in the city of St. Louis, that largely overlookable red brick abstraction that is neither West nor Middle West, neither South nor North; the city lost in the middle, as I think of it. I have always found it interesting that it was the home of T. S. Eliot and, only eighty-five years before that, the starting point of Western expansion. It is a place, I suppose, the world can’t get away from fast enough.

What went on between Beth Bolger and me is hardly worth the words that would be required to explain it away. At any distance but the close range I saw it from, it was an ordinary adultery—spirited, thrilling, and then, after a brief while, when we had crossed the continent several times and caused as many people as possible unhappiness, embarrassment, and heartache, it became disappointing and ignoble and finally almost disastrous to those same people. Because it is the truth and serves to complicate Mack’s unlikable dilemma and to cast him in a more sympathetic light, I will say that at one point he was forced to confront me (and Beth, as well) in a hotel room in St. Louis—a nice, graceful old barn called the Mayfair—with the result that I got banged around in a minor way and sent off into the downtown streets of St. Louis on a warmly humid autumn Sunday afternoon, without the slightest idea of what to do, ending up waiting for hours at the airport for a midnight flight back to New York. Apart from my dignity, I left behind and never saw again a brown silk Hermès scarf with tassels that my mother had given me for Christmas in 1971, a gift she felt was the nicest thing she’d ever seen and perfect for a man just starting life as an editor. I am glad she did not have to know about my losing it, or how it happened.

I also did not see Beth Bolger again, except for one sorrowful and bitter drink we had together in the theatre district last spring, a nervous, uncomfortable meeting we somehow felt obligated to have, and following which I walked away down Forty-seventh Street feeling that all of life was a sorry mess, while Beth went along to see “The Iceman Cometh,” which was playing then. We have not seen each other since that leave-taking, and, as I said, to tell more would not be quite worth the words.

But when I saw Mack Bolger standing in the great, crowded, holiday-bedecked concourse of Grand Central, looking rather vacant-headed but clearly himself, so far from the middle of the country, I was taken by a sudden, strange impulse—which was to walk straight across through the eddying currents of travellers and speak to him, just as you might speak to anyone you casually knew and had unexpectedly but not unhappily encountered. And not to impart anything, or to set in motion any particular action (to clarify history, for instance, or make amends), but just to speak and create an event where before there was none. And not an unpleasant event, or a provocative one. Just a dimensionless, unreverberant moment, a contact, unimportant in every other way. Life has few enough of these moments—the rest of it being involved so completely in the predictable and the obligated.

I knew a few things about Mack Bolger, about his life since we’d confronted each other semi-violently in the Mayfair Hotel. Beth had been happy to tell me during our woeful drink at the Espalier Bar in April. Our—Beth’s and my—love affair was, of course, only one feature in the long devaluation and decline in her and Mack’s marriage. This I’d understood. There were two children; Mack had been frantic to hold matters together for the sake of their futures. Beth was a portrait photographer who worked from home but craved engagement with the wide world outside University City—craved it in the worst way, and was therefore basically unhappy with everything in her life. After my departure, she moved out of their house, took an apartment near the Gateway Arch, and for a time took a much younger lover. Mack, for his part in their upheaval, eventually quit his job as an executive for a large agribiz company, considered studying for the ministry, considered going on a missionary journey to Senegal or French Guiana; briefly took a young lover himself. One child had been arrested for shoplifting; the other had gotten admitted to Brown. There were months of all-night confrontations, some combative, some loving and revelatory, some derisory from both sides. Until everything that could be said or expressed or threatened was in its time said, expressed, threatened and a standstill was achieved by which they both stayed in their house but kept separate schedules, saw different new friends, had occasional dinners together, went to the Muny Opera, occasionally even slept together, but saw little hope (in Beth’s case) of things turning out better than they were at the time of our joyless drink together and the O’Neill play. I’d assumed then that Beth was meeting someone else that evening, had someone in New York she was interested in, and I felt completely fine about it.

“It’s really odd,” Beth said, stirring her long, almost pure-white finger around the surface of her Kir Royale, staring not at me but at the glass rim where the pink liquid nearly exceeded its vitreous limits but did not, “we were so close.” Her eyes rose to me, and she smiled affectionately. “You and I, I mean. Now I feel like I’m telling all this to an old friend. Or to my brother.”

Beth is a tall, sallow-faced, big-boned, ash-blond woman who smokes too many cigarettes and whose hair always hangs down in her eyes like a forties Hollywood glamour girl’s. This can be attractive, although it also causes her sometimes to seem to be spying on her own conversations.

“Well,” I said, “it’s all right to feel that way.” I smiled back across the little round black-topped café table. It was all right. I had gone on. When I looked back on what we’d done, none of it except for what we’d done in bed made me feel good about life, or that the experience had been finally worth it. But I couldn’t undo it. I don’t believe the past can be repaired that way. It can only be exceeded. “Sometimes,” I went on, “friendship’s all we’re after in the first place.” This, I admit, I did not really believe.

“Mack’s like a dog, you know,” Beth said and flicked her hair away from her eyes. He was on her mind. “I kick him,” she said, “and he tries to bring me things. It’s pathetic. He’s very interested in Tantric sex now, whatever that is. Do you know what that even is?”

“I don’t like hearing this,” I said stupidly, though it was true. “It sounds cruel.”

“You’re just afraid I’ll say it about you, Johnny.” She smiled and touched her damp fingertip to her lips, which were wonderful lips.

“Afraid?” I said. “Afraid’s really not the word, is it?”

“Well, then, whatever the word is.” Beth turned her head quickly away and signalled the waiter for the check. She did not know how to be disagreed with. It always frightened her.

But that was all. I already said that our meeting was not a satisfying one.

Mack Bolger’s pale-gray eyes caught me coming toward him well before I expected them to. We had seen each other only twice. Once at a fancy cocktail party given by an author I had come to St. Louis to wrest a book from. It was the time I had met his wife. And once more, at the Mayfair Hotel, when I’d taken an inept swing at him, and he’d slammed me against a wall and hit me in the face with the back of his hand. Perhaps you don’t forget people you knock around. That becomes their place in your life. I, however, find it hard to recognize people when they’re not where I believe they belong, and Mack Bolger belonged in St. Louis. But he was an exception.

Mack’s eyes fixed on me, then left me, scanned the crowd uncomfortably, then found me again as I approached him. His large, tanned face took on an expression of stony unsurprise, as if he’d known I was somewhere in the terminal and a form of communication had already begun between us. Though, if anything, really, his face looked resigned—resigned to me, resigned to the situations the world foists on you unwilling, resigned to himself. It was what we had in common, though neither of us had a language which could express that. So, as I came into his presence, what I felt was an unexpected sympathy—for him, for having to see me now. And if I could’ve turned and walked straight away from him I would have.

“I just saw you,” I said from the crowd, five feet before I expected to speak. My voice isn’t loud, so that the theatrically nasal male voice announcing an arrival from Poughkeepsie on Track 34 seemed possibly to have blotted it out.

“Did you have something special in mind to tell me,” Mack Bolger said. His eyes cast out again across the vaulted hall, where Christmas shoppers and overbundled passengers were moving in all directions. It occurred to me—shockingly—that he was waiting for Beth, and that in a moment’s time I would be standing there facing her and Mack together, almost as I had in St. Louis. My heart actually struck two profound beats deep in my chest, then seemed for a moment to stop altogether. “How’s your face?” Mack said without emotion, still scanning the crowd. “I didn’t hurt you too bad, did I?”

“No,” I said.

“You’ve grown a mustache.” His eyes did not flicker toward me.

“Yes,” I said. I’d forgotten about it, and for some reason felt ashamed, as if I looked absurd.

“Well,” Mack said, “good.” His voice was the one you would use to speak to someone in line beside you at the post office, someone you would never see again. Though there was also, just barely noticeable, a hint of what we used to call juiciness in his speech, some minor undispersable moisture in his cheek that one heard in each of his “s”s and “f”s. It was unfortunate, I thought. It robbed him of a small measure of gravity. I had not noticed it before, in the few overheated moments we’d had to exchange words.

He looked at me again, hands in his expensive Italian coat pockets, a coat that had heavy dark bone buttons and long, wide lapels. Too stylish for him, I thought, for the solid man he was. Mack and I were nearly the same height. But he was in every way larger and seemed to look down to me—something in the way he held his chin up. It was almost the opposite of the way Beth looked at me.

“I live here now,” Mack said, without really addressing me. I noticed he had long, dark, almost feminine eyelashes and perfectly sized, perfectly shaped ears, which his new haircut put on nice display. He might’ve been forty—younger than I am—and looked more than anything like an army officer. A major. I thought of a letter Beth had shown me, written by Mack to her, containing the phrase “I want to kiss you all over. Yes I do. Macklin.” Beth had rolled her eyes when she showed it to me. At another time she had talked to Mack on the telephone while we were in bed together naked. On that occasion she’d kept rolling her eyes at whatever he was saying—something, I gathered, about various difficulties he was having at work. Once we even engaged in a sexual act while she talked to him. I could hear his little, buzzing, fretful-sounding voice inside the receiver. But that was now erased. Everything Beth and I had done was over. All that remained of it was just this—a series of moments in the great train terminal, moments which, in their own way and in spite of everything, seemed correct, sturdy, almost classical in character, as if this later time were what really mattered, whereas the previous, passionate, linked, but now distant moments were merely preliminary.

“Did you buy a place?” I said to Mack Bolger, and unexpectedly felt a widely spreading vacancy open all around inside of me. It was such a preposterous thing to say.

Mack’s eyes moved slowly to me, and his impassive expression, which had seemed to me to signify one thing—resignation—began to signify something different. I knew this because a small cleft appeared in his chin. “Yes,” he said and let his eyes stay fixed on me. People were shouldering past us. I could smell some woman’s heavy, hot-feeling perfume around my face. Music had commenced in the rotunda, making the moment feel clamorous, suffocating: “We three kings of Orient are . . . ” “Yes,” Mack Bolger said again, very emphatically, spitting the word from between his straight, white, nearly flawless teeth. He had grown up on a farm in Nebraska, had gone to a small college in Minnesota on a football scholarship, had then taken an M.B.A. at Harvard; had done well. All that life, all that experience was being brought into play now as self-control, dignity. It was strange that someone would call him a dog when he wasn’t that at all. He was extremely admirable. “I bought an apartment on the Upper East Side,” he said suddenly and blinked his eyes very rapidly. “I moved out in September. I have a new job. I’m living alone. Beth’s not here. She’s in Paris, where she’s miserable—or I hope she is. We’re getting a divorce. I’m waiting for my daughter to come down from boarding school. Is that all right? Does that seem all right to you? Does that satisfy your curiosity?”

“Yes,” I said. “Of course.” Mack was not angry. He was, instead, a thing that anger had no part of or at least had long been absent from, something akin to exhaustion, where the words you say are the only true words you can say. Myself, I did not think I’d ever felt that way. Always for me there had been a choice.

“Do you understand me?” Mack Bolger said. His thick athlete’s brow slowly furrowed, as if he were studying a creature he didn’t entirely understand, an anomaly of some kind, which perhaps I was.

“Yes,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“Well, then,” he said, and seemed suddenly embarrassed. He looked away, out over the crowd of swarming heads and faces, as if he’d just sensed someone coming. I looked toward where he was looking. No one was approaching us. Not Beth, not a daughter. Not anyone. Perhaps, I thought, it was all a lie. Or perhaps, I thought, for a moment I had lost consciousness, and this was not Mack Bolger at all, and I was dreaming everything. “Do you think there could be someplace else you could go now?” Mack said. His big, tanned, handsome face looked imploring and exhausted. Once Beth had said Mack and I looked alike. But we did not. That had been her fantasy. Without really looking at me again he said, “I would have a hard time introducing you to my daughter. I’m sure you can imagine that.”

“Yes,” I said. I looked around again, and this time I did see a pretty blond girl standing in the crowd, watching us from several steps away. She was holding a red nylon backpack by its straps. Something was causing her to stay away. Possibly her father had signalled her not to come near us. “Of course,” I said. And by speaking I somehow made the girl’s face break into a wide smile, a smile I recognized.

“Nothing’s happened here,” Mack said suddenly to me. He was staring at his daughter. From the pocket of his overcoat he had produced a tiny white box wrapped and tied with a red bow.

“I’m sorry?” I said. I was leaving. People were swirling noisily around us. The music seemed louder. I thought perhaps I’d misunderstood him. “I didn’t hear you.” I smiled in an entirely involuntary way.

“Nothing’s happened today,” Mack Bolger said. “Don’t go away thinking anything happened here. Between you and me, I mean. Nothing’s happened. I’m sorry I ever met you, that’s all. Sorry I ever had to touch you. You make me feel ashamed.” He still had the unfortunate dampness with his “s”s.

“Well,” I said. “All right. I can understand.”

He simply stepped away from me and began saying something toward the blond girl standing in the crowd smiling. What he said was “Boy, oh boy, do you look like a million bucks.”

I walked on toward Billy’s then, to the new arrangement I’d made that would take me on into the evening. I had been wrong, of course, about the linkage of moments, and about what was preliminary and what was primary. It was a mistake, one I would not make again. None of this was a good thing to have done. Though it is such a large city here, so much larger than, say, St. Louis, I knew I would not see him again. ♦

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